Saturday, December 16, 2006

Stuck

I'm struggling over how to flesh out certain events in my story. They're major events in history, but because Herodotus is sketchy about chronological order at (or at least he has to go back and forth in time to tell various stories) it's hard for me to make events clear. I also keep toying with different ideas to make the characters relevant to the plot. Pausanias will not be a shining hero for quite awhile. How do I tell the story from his POV in the meantime? Is he a squire to King Leonidas and witnesses certain events? Do I need to let his POV go and focus on a different Spartan character for the first book? It's so frustrating because I've written a lot with Paus and am trying to make the plot character driven, not just about action. Does anyone else have this problem? It really stalls my writing process...

7 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Hm, difficult one since my writing is quite different. For one, I write multiple and omniscient POV, and second I always have major fictive characters besides the historical ones, and can always tell their story when history gets boring. ;)

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In the sense that your struggling to match up the history - what there is of it - with where your plot has evolved to so far? I should think all historical fiction writers meet that sooner or later. I don't know the history well, so forgive me if this is a dim question. Is the problem that Pausanius is your main character but you're struggling to tell the history that happened before he appears in Herodotus? If so, making him a squire would seem quite an appealing solution; even a shining hero has to start somewhere :-) And could the history he witnesses as a squire shape his character and influence the actions he takes when he becomes a hero?

Pausanias is actually one of a handful of main characters. I want to tie him into the plot without making his presence..."repetitious" (another POV character is also a Spartan). I realized last night that I MIGHT be able to accomplish this by focusing Pausanias in a totally different part of Sparta while the other Spartan POV stays in Sparta and travels to Persia). I have to toy with the idea some more. @_@;